Archive for October 29, 2009

Sometimes, when I actually have the time, I’ll watch an episode of Oprah. I have the DVR set up to record the show, then I go through and hand-pick the ones that seem interesting to me. Yesterday I watched an episode about a Texas man who was infected with HIV and intentionally spread the virus to multiple women. KNOWINGLY. Five women swallowed their fear and shame and came onto the Oprah show to tell their stories.

It was heart-wrenching.

All five of these women were recently divorced after long marriages (10 years, 20 years, 25 years.) All were new on the dating scene. All were naive and trusting. And they were all sentenced to death by a man wielding HIV-infected blood in his veins.

And he knew he was HIV positive the entire time he was with these women.

These women weren’t promiscuous. In fact, almost all of them had been in a long-term relationship with the man, whose name is Philippe Padieu, a 53-year old Martial Arts instructor. They were all unaware that he was cheating on each of them with multiple other women.

It had been established that he was aware of his HIV status since 2005. These women were all involved with him after 2005, and they said that he assured each and every one of them that he had been tested and was HIV-free, insisting that using protection was completely unnecessary.

One of the women found out she was HIV-positive at a routine gynecologist appointment. She immediately called Padieu, but he ignored her calls and messages. She had suspicions, however, that he had been cheating on her. Since she was paying Padieu’s cell phone bill, she combed through his phone record and called numbers she did not recognize, contacting the other women he was cheating on her with. She told them he had infected her with the HIV virus and urged them to get tested as well.

They all tested positive.

The women banded together, five of them later to appear on the Oprah show I watched, and started watching his house, curious about how many other women he was seeing. They were dumbstruck at the amount of different vehicles and various women who continued to come and go. Together, they decided to stand up to Padieu so they called the police since he knew he had HIV and was still having unprotected sex with multiple women. Finally, the CDC issued a Cease and Desist order for him to immediately stop having unprotected sex and to disclose his HIV status to potential partners.

These women said that he still continued to have more female guests come and go from his house.

Finally, he was arrested and the courts found him guilty of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, his HIV-tainted blood being the deadly weapon, and sentenced him to 45 years in prison.

If you ask me, that’s not enough. I’m not always all for capital punishment, but in this instance, I believe this man should be given the death penalty. Multiple women are now sentenced to death. Their lives will never be the same. Who knows how many other women were infected and who could have already died, never knowing they had HIV. And the people they unknowingly infected. And so on…

People like him make me sick. They do not deserve to enjoy life after INTENTIONALLY shattering the lives of hundreds people. Not only did he give his victims a death sentence, but the families and children of those women are also affected. He knowingly infected these women with HIV, fully aware that it would eventually kill them. That’s a serial killer in my book.

Yeah, I think 45 years was too light of a sentence. He should have been charged and found guilty of murder- or at the very least, attempted murder.